It was late February, toward the end of his final season in NCAA basketball, and Zeke Marshall stood far from the spotlight. Here he was, a star center on a team with an 18-game winning streak and hardly anyone knew his name, but he expressed no desire on that day to change anything about where he’d chosen to spend his college career.

Lots of more prominent basketball programs than Akron had recruited Marshall. Great student, athletic 7-footer—who wouldn’t want that guy? But he wanted Akron, in part because he was attracted to its challenging computer information program.

“I don’t regret choosing this school at all,” Marshall told Sporting News. “I have a lot of good, positive memories here. I have no regrets. I think it was a great decision.”

Marshall wasn’t unusual, really. Nate Wolters played his senior season at South Dakota State, Isaiah Canaan at Murray State, Ian Clark at Belmont and Mike Muscala at Bucknell. This is what happens most everywhere, most every time.

The handful of players transferring each season to compete for different schools as graduate students is leading some coaches to contend this practice is a disaster for college basketball, an epidemic, but it’s really not much more than an occasion for them to complain.

In an article by Rustin Dodd published Saturday by the Kansas City Star, Southern Illinois coach Barry Hinson charged that “poaching” was going on to get top mid-major players to transfer to bigger-name schools. Kansas State’s Bruce Weber told the Star, “Schools are recruiting kids right off of campus.”

And yet neither coach was quoted as placing the blame for those circumstances on the coaches who might be doing the poaching.

And nowhere in the article was a mention of how coaches’ job-hopping and institutions’ coach-firing can lead players to conclude they, too, might find a better circumstance at a different program.

After the 2011-12 season, there were 52 coaching changes in college basketball, including 34 openings created by firings or “resignations” and another 18 by retirements or those who left to accept better positions.

How many of those were there? Six. The most prominent probably was Julius Mays, who transferred from N.C. State to Wright State, spent a year in residence and played one season for the Raiders, and then left for a single season at Kentucky.

Does six transfers leaving behind mid-majors for bigger programs sound like an epidemic to you?

Weber told the Star the graduate transfer rule is “totally unfair to programs where they’ve worked with kids for four years.”

Except Mays’ case shows that not all grad transfers fit that description, even. Konner Tucker began his career at Wake Forest, transferred to Sam Houston and then finished his career at UTEP. So maybe he had the transferring bug really bad, but that doesn’t mean it was a contagion.

Most players at mid-major programs finish their careers where they began, and that is particularly true when they are part of stable programs. Marshall’s four years at Akron turned out well because Akron made it so. The coach who recruited him, Keith Dambrot, ran the Zips all four years. The staff built a successful team around Marshall.

Marshall finished his career in the NCAA Tournament, completing a fourth season with the program that had recruited him (and beat out all those big-timers) five years earlier. That’s far more common. It’s not even close.